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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Funnily enough... they DID get around to it. (Just, presumably, not back then.) Star Trek: the Next Generation had mention in materials provided to its writers that the Galaxy-class's cartographic staff included a pair of orcas and a small pod of dolphins, who were kept in the Cetacean Ops lab in the saucer section. They were apparently considered full members of the ship's science staff. (The existence of the lab and the animals in it is mentioned in passing twice in the series, once in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and once in "The Perfect Mate". It was also in a line in "Relics" that was modified to address the holodeck instead.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek is a fantastic example of it... reams and reams of technical detail go into developing the setting, most of which never come up except as part of lists of THOU SHALT NOTs that the writers are expected to comply with. 99.9% of this technical material being developed for Macross never shows up or is even mentioned in the shows, it's entirely for the consumption of the fans and guidance for the animators about what a mecha can or can't do.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Whoops, sorry... the way I phrased that is hideously unclear. I really shouldn't write when I'm three sheets to the wind on antihistamines. What I meant is that, individually, the Zentradi don't have any mecha able to rival a 5th Generation VF and an emigrant fleet has the firepower to handle anything up to about the branch fleet level via superweapons like the Battle-class's Macross Cannon and their arsenals of thermonuclear reaction weapons... but a Zentradi Army main fleet has such an overwhelming advantage of numbers that those individual advantages are all but meaningless and the only real option an emigrant fleet has is to avoid detection. In short, if it came to a fight between an emigrant fleet with 5th Generation VFs and a Zentradi Main Fleet, the New UN Spacy would reap a fearful talley from the Zentradi before being overwhelmed in short order because the Zentradi outnumber them by several orders of magnitude. A fleet like Chlore's, which has over ten thousand ships, is a bit big for a fleet as small as the 37th Large-Scale Emigrant Fleet to tackle... but probably wouldn't be as big a threat for one of the larger emigrant fleets like Macross Frontier or Macross Valiant, the latter of which allegedly has over 900 ships on its own. The (New) UN Spacy's defenses seem to be largely structured around the expectation of fighting a Zentradi force of roughly branch fleet scale (~1,100 ships). The former Varauta system defense flagship (Gepernich's ship) was built to table a branch fleet more or less singlehandedly through overwhelming firepower.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, remember it's explained in series that the "humans were created by ancient aliens" thing is considered a crackpot theory only really taken seriously by a handful of anthropologists and researchers like Dr. Hasford and Dr. Turner. Even if the Birdhuman incident hadn't been classified top secret, having an alien ambassador tell you point-blank that that particular crackpot theory was gospel truth would've been a profound shock for the UN Government.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if I wasn't going to avoid the show like the plague before... I sure as hell am NOW. There's nothing that says "drooling incompetence" quite as much as the producing saying "we know what the essence of Star Trek is, but we're shelving it because having characters on the same side constantly yell at each other is more dramatic". The simple fact that they're surprised that the established fanbase is pissed about the massive departures from canon shows that they didn't learn a damn thing from the failure of Star Trek: Enterprise either. Fans were OK with a prequel as long as the timeline isn't being dicked with, and Enterprise went well out of its way to make dicking with the timeline something that underpins the entire plot. If Enterprise was the actual Titanic, hitting an iceberg because its crew wasn't paying proper attention, then the Discovery series seems to be more like the starliner Titanic from Futurama, jackknifing from hazard to hazard for no reason beyond the ineptitude of the people in charge. I can only hope that this show meets with an early end so it doesn't have a chance to inflict much collateral damage on competently-made Star Trek. After Voyager, the TNG movies, and the jumping-off point for the Abrams movies, I'm pretty convinced the Prime continuity is unviable now. There's no credible antagonist left, which is why it seems like every non-canon Star Trek title seems to think the only recourse is for the Klingons to withdraw from the Khitomer Accords again. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine established the Gamma Quadrant's one major power was the Dominion, and when it went down it took almost every credible Alpha and Beta quadrant antagonist with it. The Cardassian Union took one on the chin no less than six times in the series: they lost Bajor to the Bajoran rebels, they lost whole planets to the Maquis, the Obsidian Order walked blithely into a Dominion trap and was wiped out, the Klingons invaded, then the Alliance invaded, and their allies began decimating them when they switched sides at the end. The Romulan Star Empire lost most of the Tal Shiar in the same fool's errand that the Obsidian Order perished in, then lost a huge chunk of its fleet in the ensuing war, the entire senate was assassinated in one go by a single intelligence operative, and then they lost a good chunk of their territory to a botched illegal subspace weapons test that destroyed Romulus. The Klingon Empire wound up taking a beating against the Cardassian Union thanks to Federation intervention, then another one when they declared war on the Federation, then a third beating when they joined with the Federation to fight the Dominion. The Breen lost a good chunk of their fleet siding with the Dominion. The Maquis were wiped out by the Dominion. Voyager stepped in and took a whack at the last credible established antagonist, putting the Borg Collective through a humiliation conga that ended with the near-destruction of the collective, the death of the Borg Queen, and the loss of their transwarp network. That aside, they encountered and neutered Species 8472, the only other serious threat they encountered. Everyone else they found was largely outmatched by the technology of a relatively lightly armed Federation science ship. The Kazon and Vidiians were never a serious threat to a properly equipped ship, and they couldn't find a recurring antagonist after that except the Borg. The only faction left standing when the dust settled was the Federation, who not only came out with the least casualties in the Dominion War but also beat the Borg and now have future tech toys from Admiral Janeway's temporal shenanigans. Who's left, besides the conspirators in the Temporal Cold War plot that Enterprise did such a poor job with? Most of them are established to be less advanced than the Federation's own Starfleet temporal agents. Even Future Guy, the Sphere Builders, and the Na'kuhl didn't really have the muscle to match Starfleet. They wrote themselves into a corner, so I wouldn't be opposed to a reboot if it were actually well written. Discovery... isn't, as far as we can tell.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's pretty easy for me to get distracted by it sometimes too... especially considering the sheer amount of detail Kawamori and Chiba pour into the mecha, which goes way beyond just about every other mecha series I've worked on translations for. Make no mistake, even if Macross is truly a love story first and mecha series second, the mecha are themselves a labor of love for the creative staff. (Mind you, I'm pretty darn sure the Zentradi Army monstrously outnumbers and outguns the Galactic Empire... I've never really found another sci-fi series where there is an antagonist that has THAT kind of manpower behind it, with billions of ships and tens of trillions of clone soldiers. It really drives home how a pangalactic civilization could be wiped out in the space of just a couple years, when you have clone armies that large fighting.) I doubt it. Kawamori's never been one for that kind of allegory, and his Aesops are usually delivered with all the subtlety of a half-brick to the head (e.g. Macross Dynamite 7's "save the whales"). (Plus, usually when there ARE World War II allegorical links being drawn in anime, the Japanese or ersatz-Japanese characters always seem to land on the Allies' side. The original Mobile Suit Gundam is an incredibly blatant example of this, with Japan and the Japanese characters explicitly on the Federation side and Zeon being essentially just "Space Nazi Germany". In a few titles I know of where characters somehow end up sent back in time to World War II, it usually takes the form of "the folly of our ancestors" with the characters attempting to stay out of the war for fear that if they intervened Japan wouldn't be able to throw off its imperialism, etc.) IMO, the love triangle in Macross Delta suffered from the same problem the one in Macross Frontier did: it was incredibly one-sided. Like Ranka in the TV series, Mirage was marginalized by her opposite number to the extent that she never really got any time with the main character that wasn't about the other girl to some extent. The characters were interesting, but from about the fourth or fifth episode it was incredibly obvious that Mirage was not going to win that the love triangle was almost in-name-only. Like Sheryl, Freyja got all the screen time, all the character development, and all the alone time with the protagonist while the other only really managed "clingy jealous girl" and "can't spit it out".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The aircraft designs are, as we know, his personal passion... but Macross has always revolved around the love story first and foremost. The war, and the characters involvement in it, always serves mainly to advance the love story. It's not like Macross is the only series where parts of the audience miss the forest for the trees. Star Trek has that perennial problem where its audience misses the allegory and social commentary that were the main reason for its existence because they're distracted by the sci-fi shiny bits. (I'm frequently guilty of that myself.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That's one reason among many that You-Know-Who's proposal for a live-action film will almost certainly never be actioned for production... it's practically begging for a copyright infringement lawsuit by any standard, and it's damn near impossible to determine how far is "far enough" in distancing a project like that from source material they can't legally use. (That's not to say studios don't sometimes do dumb things like proceeding with films that will obviously get them sued... e.g. Halle Berry's Catwoman... but it is a relative rarity.) The Show That Must Not Be Named did it well before then, in actual fact. It was implied back in their adaptation of MOSPEADA, but in the first episode of their canceled OVA they avoided even using the word "Zentradi". They're very much aware of the limitations on what they can use, legally speaking, and it has dominated their creative process since the very beginning (per the remarks of Mr. Macek at a convention in 1995.) Several thousand, yes. According to Records Officer Exsedol Folmo, there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Main Fleets operating in the Milky Way. There were, according to Macross Chronicle, once approximately 5,000 such fleets. They vary somewhat in size, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of ships per Macross Chronicle. Chlore's fleet was, IIRC, only tens of thousands of ships in Macross 7. She was likely a Direct Defense Fleet commander, since the Macross 7 series treats the SDF Macross version of the war as the more accurate one WRT factions and continuity. Available setting materials suggest that encounters with rogue Zentradi branch fleets occur fairly often and even the occasional skirmish with main fleet-scale forces isn't unheard-of. The rogue fleets don't seem to be regarded as a significant threat, and are generally either destroyed through superior firepower or exposed to Earth culture. It's suggested that main fleets are avoided at all costs, since the amount of firepower necessary to repel one is outside the scope of what an emigrant fleet can provide. (This is probably one of the things that keeps the Federal New UN Forces too busy to intervene in inter-colony squabbles.) It wouldn't really be a new development, story-wise... the Macross II: Lovers Again chronology has it happen with distressing regularity, and by 2092 the UN Spacy there had repelled at least four more main fleets after the Boddole Zer and Laplamiz ones in 2009-2010. They'd gotten VERY good at it, which is one of the reasons they had become so complacent by the time the Mardook showed up. I think a main continuity emigrant fleet encountering a main fleet wouldn't be much of a fight, regardless. If they were armed with 5th Generation VFs the Zentradi don't have anything that can really rival that, and the fleet would get wiped out if it tried to go head-to-head with anything much larger than a branch fleet. (This is why, in Master File's accounts, the military will sacrifice and even self-destruct ships to avoid having main fleets discover the location of emigrant fleets.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    If you were to ask Kawamori, he'd tell you flat out that the focus has never been on mecha and battles. As he would, and has, put it the focus of Macross has always been on the love story. All that stuff with space battles and transforming fighters is just an expansive backdrop for the all-important romance to play out on.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The annoying thing about that is the fact that the obligation to have a Jenius in every Macross series combined with the apparent limit of one Token Girl Teammate means that if you want the gals in the cast to actually DO something besides sing from the sidelines your only option is the Jenius du jour. I appreciate that the damsel in distress is a classic storytelling technique, and Japan loves its barrier maiden trope, but I'd personally like to see this setting, in which the Zentradi have all-female elite forces, cough up a few more female pilots. The (New) UN Forces doesn't bar women from frontline combat service, so where are they? The Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and its prequels didn't seem to have a problem with it, and the light novels, manga, and video games that've been made for Kawamori's chronology have cheerfully included loads of 'em, but the animation seems reluctant to include them.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... y'know how artists are sometimes embarrassed of their early works? That's how I feel about those early translations of mine from ~2002. My grasp of the language was still pretty basic, I'd only managed to lay hands on a few Japanese publications, and the effort was mainly a bid to correct the more obvious errors in the Macross II RPG series published by Palladium Books. It made for great practice, though, since the more I learned the more the errors became obvious ones, necessitating more research. By the time I was done I'd moved on to my first self-run site, the ratio of red ink to original text in those books was probably four or five to one, and my players were about ready to wring my neck for constantly fiddling with the stats to make them more accurate. Most of the questions that I spent weeks working on answers for back then would barely merit asking in this thread these days.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's why I wasn't willing to commit to that one as still viable... some bits of Star Trek: the Animated Series fit pretty well without any finessing like the Constitution-class pre-refit USS Enterprise having a sort of proto-holodeck, while others fit rather less well like the life support/personal forcefield belts, automatic bridge defense system, or that 1:1 scale inflatable USS Enterprise decoy deployed from the shuttlebay. I know Star Trek Online isn't canon, so its use of them isn't exactly a fair indicator. (Still, the automatic bridge defense system would've made Starfleet security's job SO. MUCH. EASIER. if it hadn't been abandoned. Aliens beam in and take over the bridge? Let a huge automated phaser turret sort 'em out.)
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Hong Kong dollars... so it's not as ruinous as it looks, but it's still pretty steep at about $770 US plus shipping (with a $320 deposit).
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not so sure it wasn't a planar field... if you look at the areas where the Enterprise-B suffered damage in Generations the area Kirk was suffered a hull breach across a large, almost perfectly flat stretch of hull right along the edge of the portside engineering section "fin". (The most complicated force field seen to date would have to be TAS's life support belt... but who knows if that still counts?) Nope, your memory is quite accurate... and it appears we've found our first genuine non-aesthetic anachronism. The USS Shenzhou and USS Discovery are about fifteen years too early to have the kind of force field technology we see in the Star Trek: Discovery trailer. The show's set in 2255, when the Federation's most advanced starships were still dependent on emergency bulkheads to seal hull breaches and had to depressurize their shuttlebays in order to launch or recover shuttles. It's a set of advancements in force field technology made in the 2270s and 2280s, with the refit Constitution-class receiving just the shuttlebay containment field, and the emergency force fields not showing up until the Excelsior-class circa 2287-2293. The first chronological appearance of an emergency force field was on the Enterprise-B in 2293.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    No, I hadn't heard that they'd restored the old content... I'll wade into that wretched hive of scum and villainy later in search of those old topics. Edit: Ave deus mechanicus... this means all my old Macross II translations are back in the wild again. Here's hoping nobody digs them up, or I'll be back to getting ten e-mails a week asking how Macross's sequels all fit together.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, so it is. It's hard to see through the VFX of the forcefield but the corridor's mostly gone just past it. Still, isn't this a period in time when they were still struggling with planar forcefields? Even later shows had a hard time doing anything more than simple flat field surfaces or cylinders.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not anymore, I'm afraid. The conversation I had about it with members of The Show That Must Not Be Named's creative staff was on their old official forums, and has probably been lost as a consequence. (It was one of several discussions I wish I'd thought to save before the site went down.) The intention they had expressed - and this was back when the license was still held by WB - was to have the proposed film be a reboot/reimagining that drew only on those aspects of their show which were not covered by copyrights held by other parties. In short, the intention for that new property's development was to be free and clear of potential litigious entanglements that naturally occur as the result of building a franchise on secondhand source material. (At the time, the man who is now the company's VP of Marketing had expressed considerable frustration that the chain of approvals which ran through their legal counsel made it all but impossible to respond in a timely fashion to proposals for new products or even news posts for the official site's front page.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the available information (some of which comes from Harmony Gold's staff), Tatsunoko is not involved... it's set to be a reimagined version of the R-word plot that ditches all but the broadest strokes unique to the R-word version. (The goal being to separate itself from all of the Macross legal problems.) (Of course, the info from HG is like five or six years old by now...)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, close only counts in horseshoes and tactical thermonuclear devices... she's the first time a Jenius has failed to deliver on the family's promise of awesomeness. Darn cute tho, but I'm more interested in having the gals in the cockpit kick ass. Never heard of it, but then my job keeps me so damned busy it's been several months since I actually turned my living room TV on...
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Can't say I recall the boy band part... We've had some permutations similar to that in the manga and light novels... not quite there, but close. Like Macross R, where most of the cast (soldiers and civilians alike) is female. It didn't get what you'd call a love triangle, though, and the only singer was a retired one who was also one of the pilots. I'd rather enjoy another Macross show like II where we get some asskicking women in uniform instead of just the Token Girl Teammate. 7 did briefly tease a truly triangular love triangle with Basara-Gamlin, shame it turned out to be a gag. He noticed Gamlin way before he noticed Mylene was a girl. A tall order, to be sure... most of the film industry is still struggling with that one. Even the more progressive shows, like Star Trek, have outright bailed on that one multiple times for fear that the writers wouldn't do it justice or it wouldn't sell. (I guess Ouran High School Host Club hit pretty close to the mark with Ranka/Ryouji, who was an okama and openly bi in a comedy series that somehow managed to treat his orientation completely respectfully, so it CAN be done... it's just really tricky.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I dunno... I don't think having a group with multiple singers worked all that well in the Macross Delta series, and I don't think gender-flipping it would really help the underlying problem any. Macross Delta's cast was HUGE for a Macross series, because each singer needed to have a pilot to protect them, and each pilot had to have an opposite number on the enemy side. As a result, even leaving most of the Aerial Knights out in the cold left them with so many main characters that there was no choice but to leave most of them undeveloped. In Walkure, it was so bad that the only one to get properly characterized was Freyja. Kaname's whole character was built around her being the broken bird, Mikumo was more macguffin than person, and the other two were so irrelevant to the show that their bios on the official website give more than their appearances in the show do. I think we need to get back to a smaller cast, or double the run length of the show like 7 did.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure if she's got a brother complex or if she's just really, REALLY into androgynous guys... she did go for Alto after all. "Females"? What are we, Ferengi? (I mean, yeah I do work with FCA... but not that FCA.) Of the women I know well who count anime and/or manga among their hobbies, most of them are perfectly fine with a little fanservice now and then. I'd doubt most of them would actively seek out a given title specifically for fanservice as some of my guy friends are occasionally wont to do, but I do know a few who would (and do). ... dare to dream. Many are the titles that cater to an audience of women and teenage girls with precisely that manner of fanservice. The aforementioned Ouran High School Host Club has quite a number of shirtless scenes for the benefit of the ladies in the audience, though admittedly the cast itself amounts to a fanservice dispensary in-series (being, well, a kid-friendly version of a host club) and hits a fair number of other for-ladies fanservice tropes being a reverse harem comedy that turns into a romance story. It'd be nice... though since anime tends to play things either up or down for laughs most of the time, I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm still waiting to see if the new Star Trek will back down from what will be its third attempt to have an openly gay character via Star Trek: Discovery. (Just defining what constitutes "respectful" would be a real trick. I mean, on the one hand there's screaming caricatures like Emporio Ivankov from One Piece who is a transvestite based on Frank N. Furter from Rocky Horror but is treated as a respected national leader and leader in a revolutionary army fighting an oppressive world government. On the other, there's your Bobby Margots and your Gaurons, who are generally respected characters in-series and nobody gives them crap for their orientation, but their orientation itself is sometimes the source of humor or horror... e.g. Bobby's camp gay side dialog in Frontier, or Gauron's more than slightly creepy interest in young men in Full Metal Panic!.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I'm sure the fangirls and the doujinshi artists were meant to get a very specific idea about their relationship... ... I kind of want another Macross Delta gaiden manga now, with this as its premise. I can see it now: Darwent Commandery Host Club. Still, how does Hermann fit into the picture? Is he Kasanoda? Renge? ... Ranka? (I don't think he has the legs for that). Keith's already Well Done, Son guy so his dad Grammier's obviously Yuzuru. Frontier went the extra mile too... admittedly more for the fujoshi than anyone else, given that the main character was not only downright traptastic to the point that the SMS Macross Quarter's main bridge crew express some dismay that he's prettier than they are, the movies found time to work a fetish outfit into his repertoire during Sheryl's jailbreak. (At least one version of Alto and Michel's shared backstory and origin of the "princess" nickname is pure ho yay, with Michel meeting an in-costume Alto in Mihoshi Academy's performing arts department and believing him to be an actual and very attractive woman, with the predictable result.) 'course, the Frontier manga and novelization turns the for-girls (well, for fujoshi) fanservice up to 12 and breaks the freaking knob off with Alto being more than slightly too into the girl's role. (I could have lived quite happily without an adaptation that made it clear on no uncertain terms that Alto is an Uke.) Hey, it's a show set in the arbitrary spacefuture... what's wrong with a little Equal Opportunity Ogling?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, 2022... that is allegedly the expiration date on their Macross license from Tatsunoko per their comments from their last renewal. No idea what the odds are on Tatsunoko potentially declining to offer them a renewal. I can't imagine what Tatsunoko's reasons are for having bothered to renew it the last time. The tiny trickle of royalty revenue for the other two titles on the license can't possibly be enough to justify a call like that, even if they are essentially worthless monetarily otherwise. It hardly seems worth it just to spite Big West for not giving them the percentage of the profits from Macross sequels the courts ruled they weren't entitled to anyway. There has to be a reason, but whatever it is it isn't a business case that's clear from observation alone. From what we know of the legalities involved in what parts of the R-word are legally separate and distinct from Macross, losing the Tatsunoko license for Macross's original series shouldn't actually be any impediment to their plans with Sony. The copyright they have on the R-word is on a derivative work (adaptation/dub), meaning they only own the stuff that wasn't already part of the original. The parts that are their property amounts to little more than some names, some miscellaneous biographical and chronological factoids, their version's macguffin, and some badly-recorded audio tracks. Story-wise, Sony would only be able to use the broadest of the broad strokes and everything else, from the details to the designs, would have to be created from scratch to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. The title would be about the only thing left over from the (secondhand) source material.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    As promised, I went through the Blu-ray liner notes... the spec section in Volume 9's booklet doesn't talk about ordnance container variations. The VF-31A writeup in Volume 3's has a good, clear screen capture that shows the ones used by Alpha Flight in the series were outfitted with the same ordnance container that Delta Flight used, with the multidrone charger and gunpod rack. Variable Fighter Master File doesn't show the configuration from the model kits, it shows a couple that are more in line with the YF-30's with the round vs. triangular missile thing that the Master File artists are so fond of. Still a gorgeous plane tho... same with the white-and-gold Sv-262Hs. That's what I was doing... who was honestly going to count the unmentionable franchise's coma when life was good because even they'd stopped caring?
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